French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Xavier VeilhanMusical Merzbau

It is with the ‘‘Merzbau musical’’ project that Xavier Veilhan will represent France for the 57th International Art Biennale of Venice in 2017.

This installation, with the two curators, Lionel Bovier and Christian Marclay, will make a play on volume and decor in the French Pavilion, inspired by the world of the recording studio. Visitors will be able to discover exceptional musical instruments, some of which will be created for the occasion, and listen to musicians from all horizons, throughout the Venice Biennale.

Xavier Veilhan imagines an overall environment that encompasses the entire surface of the pavilion and so altering our perception of it, much in the continuity of his former immersive works The Studio (1993), The Forest and The Cave (both 1998); an installation in a formal vocabulary borrowed from the universe of the recording studio and inspired by Kurt Schwitters’ seminal work, the Merzbau. Like clearings, a few more functional spaces appear for performing, mixing or recording. Various musicians from all backgrounds are called upon to activate the structure and turn it into the ideal arena for their creations during the six months of the biennial. In this way Musical Merzbau bears witness to Xavier Veilhan’s ongoing development of exhibition platforms like The Hyperrealist Project (2003), The Glass Wall (2003) or Le Baron de Triqueti (2006), with which he continually questions the concept of the exhibition itself, in his search to somehow extend it. The pavilion becomes a place of fusion between contemporary art and music, in the framework of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College experiments.

Born in 1963, Xavier Veilhan lives and works in Paris. His work, involving sculpture, painting, video, photography and installation, consists in taking hold of what is real, particularly in its biological and technical aspects, in archetypical, generic or prototypical forms, that question the worlds of historic and contemporary representation.

Xavier Veilhan has made a host of personal exhibits, at the Modern Art Museum in Paris (1993), CCC in Tours (1995), Consortium in Dijon (1999), Mamco in Geneva (1999-2000), Magasin in Grenoble (2000), CCA Kitakyushu (2002), Pompidou Center in Paris (2004), Modern and Contemporary Art Museum in Strasbourg (2005), Château de Versailles (2009), etc.

Starting in 2012, he developed Architectones, a series of art interventions in seven major modern buildings. In 2014, he took interest in the architecture on a new scale by designing the Château de Rentilly.

In 2015, he directed two films that extend his special explorations: Vent Moderne (La Villette) andMatching Numbers (3e Scène, Paris National Opera). The same year, dual shows (Galerie Perrotin, New York and Paris) pay a tribute to producers that shape the sound of our era. Hence, the genesis of this ‘‘Merzbau Musical’’ and the collaborative work envisaged for the Pavilion.

In charge of ensuring French representation at the Venice Biennales for contemporary art and architecture, the Institut français, agency of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development, is the producer of the French Pavilion alongside the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.